Gwyneth Paltrow is a mystery to a lot of people who don't understand just what Goop is all about. To many, it seems like a brand primarily aimed at rich people. To that end, the actress and entrepreneur has developed a reputation for being tone-deaf, too fancy, or just downright hard to relate to. But with Gwyneth's new show, The Goop Lab, she has a new platform to speak out about her brand and her intentions behind it.
In many ways, the show has humanized her. In one episode of the Netflix series, which investigates wellness trends, Gwyneth spoke about her reputation, and it felt like a deeply emotional issue for her. She called it "inherently traumatizing."
An article in the new issue of Town & Country features Gwyneth on the cover. The headline reads, "Gwyneth Paltrow accepts your apology." It's a profound message and one that hints at something: Maybe we had Gwyneth all wrong. Either way, her brand is hugely successful, and now she's speaking out about how it all began and why it's so important to her in the first place.
The 47-year-old Oscar winner is a huge success. No one argues about that. But previously, we haven't heard about what really inspires Gwyneth. Now she's talking about the death of her father, director Bruce Paltrow, and how profoundly it altered her life, even driving her into a totally new line of work.
The actress shared that watching him struggle with throat cancer was horrific. He died in 2002 at the age of 58. But it was because of his health battle that Gwyneth found the ultimate inspiration. Ultimately, it pushed her toward looking at alternative therapies — things people really didn't know much about at all.
“His treatment was so brutal," she told Town & Country. "I was thinking, almost out of desperation, that we had to be able to do something else to help him. That’s when I started to research food and nutrition.”
With that little piece of information, it's tough not to understand the mission of Goop. Before, it looked like a rich celebrity capitalizing on new trends no one could really afford in an effort to get richer. Knowing the background instantly makes Gwyneth more relatable.
From there, Gwyneth launched the brand in the form of a newsletter. Of course, it expanded over the years as a website and a successful brand. Now, The Goop Lab, a fun and educational Netflix binge, is the newest piece of the puzzle. And it's a pretty good one. The trends that are explored are interesting, and the research seems thorough.
“I really believe that being alive is just a process of — if you’re not wasting your f—ing life — figuring out how you can impact the world positively,” said Gwyneth. “You can choose to engage in your life and participate in it, or you can back out and criticize everybody else in your arena.” She added, “I think what this wellness movement is really about is listening to yourself, tuning into what interests you, and trying things. Find what makes you feel better and go from there.”
Gwyneth's story to creating Goop turns out to be really quite beautiful. It's a story of loss, but also of resilience. Through her own grief, she found a way to get inspired, and it just kept growing. It wasn't without hardship and neither is her life — which is what everyone seemed to believe. Of course, that couldn't be true.
Gwyneth's close relationship with her dad somehow carried over. She was able to keep him close. In 2018, she talked about making him a part of her wedding. “My birthday is September 27 and so this past September [2018], I got married on the 29th of September. His ashes are buried under this beautiful tree at my house and we got married there — right near my dad … kind of on my dad,” she joked.
In some sense, Goop helps keep the memory of her dad alive, as well. His suffering and death is, after all, the reason Gwyneth became so interested in health and wellness. Therefore, going to work every day probably feels like staying connected with her father and not letting his death be in vain.
In 2019, she talked about that determination on the Armchair Experts podcast. “For years, I would go into kind of the deepest depression of all time around my birthday and then I thought: ‘I’ve got to reframe this somehow. My father would not want this for me."
Reframe it she did, and her father would be so proud.
